Eleni N. Gage

My latest news is the release of Magical Greece, a book of gorgeous and unusual photos of, you guessed it, Greece. Andreas Smaragdis took the pictures and I wrote the text. The book is bilingual (I wrote the text in English and it was translated into Greek), and I just saw the final version of it in the Athens airport as I was returning from Patmos where I was researching a story. Check out the new book at www.greeceinprint.com or www.economia.gr.

To reminisce about my previous events, visit the "Events" page for a listing of prior visits and photos of good times.

This website is a subtle attempt at mind control aimed at getting you to buy my first book, North of Ithaka, which was published by DeBoekerij in Holland in June, 2004, by Bantam in the United Kingdom, on July 8th, 2004, and by St. Martin's Press in May, 2005 in the U.S. The US paperback was released a year later. If you want a hardback and can't find it at your bookstore, you can still order it on www.powells.com, Booksense.com, Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com.


As for myself, I first appeared in Manhattan on Tuesday, October 8th, 1974, even though my aunts consider Tuesdays bad luck because Constantinople fell on a Tuesday. (Yes, we're Greek.) Just before my third birthday, my family moved to Athens, Greece. Five years later we relocated to Worcester, Massachusetts, the Paris of the 1980s.

I left Worcester to study Folklore and Mythology at Harvard College, specializing in Modern Greece. I graduated in 1996 and moved to New York to work at a succession of women's magazines, namely Allure, Elle, and InStyle, where I remain a Contributing Editor. In 2001 I became a full-time freelance writer, contributing to Travel+Leisure, Real Simple, The American Scholar, and The New York Times "Sunday Styles" section, among others.

Then, in March, 2002, I left Manhattan for Lia, the tiny village on the Greek-Albanian border where my father was born. (That's me at the gate to our house in the village last Fall.) There I spent 10 months going to gypsy weddings, presiding over rooster sacrifices, learning how to cook Dishrag Pie, and combating road rage, all while overseeing the rebuilding of my grandparents' house and writing a travel memoir about my experiences. After many revisions and lots of loud complaining on my part, that manuscript became North of Ithaka.